“In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering once one has acquired eyes for this marvel. How we have made everything around us clear and free and simple! How we have been able to give our sense a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a divine desire for wanton leaps and wrong inferences! How from the beginning we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, lack of scruple and caution, heartiness, and gaiety of life- in order to enjoy life! And only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far... Even if language, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees an many subtleties of gradiation; even if the inveterate Tartuffery of morals, which now belongs to our unconquerable “flesh and blood,” infects the words even of those of us who know better- here and there we understand it and laugh at the way in which precisely science at its best seeks most to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitably constructed and suitably falsified world- at the way in which, willy-nilly, it loves error, because being alive, it loves life.” (Beyond Good and Evil, Fredrich Nietzsche.)
The final part of "Living The Myth" is up on JIVE magazine's website. This entire series is probably gloriously inappropriate for their average readership, though I could well be wrong. (By that, by the way, I don't mean to imply that it is above them, so much as that this series is only tangentially connected to electronic music, hip hop, or video games. But I was given carte blanche, how could I not playfully abuse it?)
If you missed the first two parts:
Part One: Deconstructing The Modern Myth.
Part Two: So Much For Truth.
The original, somewhat abridged version of these essays ran in Disinformation's Generation Hex.
I'm probably going to take a break from running stuff on JIVE for a while, except for news and the occasional review. My focus is moving to Alterati, which is coming along nicely.
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